No pressure

Monkey has been really good. She has waited and waited. She has stopped herself from saying things, and she has renamed her drawings. But last week in the car, after telling me all about how babies like to shake their booties if you give them your fingers to hold on to, and how if we have another baby maybe we will let her give the baby her fingers for support so the baby can dance, she told me she can't wait any more. I know, baby, I know. And then,
"Mama, I think by the time we have a baby, I will be all grown up."
"Probably, since you are so very grown up already."

As Friday dragged on without a word from the clinic, as the weekend wound its brutally elastic way towards what I perceived as a certain phone call first thing Monday morning, and as Monday inched and inched all the way until mid afternoon when the phone call finally came, the debilitating cacophony in my head preventing me from accomplishing anything requiring any real effort kept building, high among the many melodies comprising it the one about how my daughter can't wait any more. She is clearly bored with this "only child" gig. She needs interaction and reflection, she longs for companionship, and soon she will be all grown up.

So you can imagine that when the nurse said that the doctor would like me to repeat the ultrasound in another six weeks, I was not amused. I very nearly lost it, actually. She started with the recommendation, and I had to ask for the result. Which is that Immanuel is still there. Pretty much the same size. Still complex. So nothing is changing, but they want to give the bastard another chance to make himself scarce. This is not what Dr.YoungGun said would happen when we saw him. He said then that appearance on the repeat ultrasound would earn that mofo a one way trip to the OR. Let's just say that I am not doing well with this prospective pushing off of our hypothetical first cycle way into the new year. Maybe even past our one year anniversary. Which I don't think I would handle too well.

The nurse was sympathetic, and seemed to be genuinely concerned. I told her that I am very unhappy about this miscommunication, and she asked whether I thought it would help to come in and talk to the doctor about it. I told her honestly that I didn't think it would help too much to have a fight with the doctor. She very gently suggested that she can put me in touch with their social worker who is very good. I said that I needed things to move and not to talk about how I feel about them not moving. The thing that annoys me the most is that both before, when I was trying to reschedule this ultrasound, and now, she said that I could try a regular GYN to see if they would be willing to do the surgery faster, to accommodate my new job. Well, first, I don't have a GYN, only an OB. Second, this smells suspiciously like encouraging doctor shopping, which I don't think is right. Either you think that I can have the surgery now, in which case you should do it yourself, or you think that I shouldn't have it now, and in that case you don't encourage me to find someone who would be willing to do it anyway. And then there is timing. I didn't bother trying to find anyone like that before now because I thought I would have a whole week to get the surgery in at this place, which seemed very doable. But now it would be a laughably impossible task of looking for someone who would get me in and do the surgery with only nine business days remaining until the start of my new job. Clearly, not happening.

I am much calmer now than I was when I was blindsided by this information earlier today. I think I came up with a compromise that should satisfy both the doctor and us-- I will ask to do the next ultrasound in four weeks rather than six, in time to have the results for our next appointment at the end of November. He'd better be amenable to this.

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Nine months ago, on another cold Monday night, my husband played his guitar and my children danced, separated by my skin. I thought that he must be a big baby-- his twists and turns were really starting to hurt. That was the last night of our before, the last time we were all together, the last time that big, important things seemed good. I can't even say that they were good. The pathologist thinks that A was so active that night because he was in pain, suffering the effects of bacterial infection which she later ruled to be a contributory cause of death. I miss him so very much today.